Avery Barlow
Avery Hollis Barlow (also known as the Courier) is a character on Plagued. She was created in September 2013 by Drew. Personality Avery is pretty self-interested. She doesn't believe in handouts and, while she can be very helpful, she'll only ever help out if there's something in the deal for her to benefit from. She's taken up the duty of self-proclaimed Fort York Courier -- she'll deliver messages, packages, essentially anything, just so long as the sender has something she can make use of. The most generous she'll get is if the sender is in dire straits and swears that the recipient will have something in the bargain for her. Avery will accept just about anything useful in return for her services, ranging from supplies to entertainment to small valuables. he's very good at what she does. Avery is naturally proficient at reading people, and she's extremely perceptive, to the point where it's very easy for her to deduce where someone is and what their behavior patterns are from small amounts of information about them. While she is not without fault and does make mistakes, particularly with unpredictable people, she's extremely smart in this sense and in few others. Avery takes guilty pleasure in frivolity, although she refrains when she has to -- whenever she's on a job, she goes entirely into business mode, where she manages to ignore all outside forces that would prevent her from doing her job. It's not like her to not follow through on a job without a very good reason -- she'll deliver come Hell or high water. When it comes to interpersonal relations, Avery isn't the most proficient. She doesn't have a wide range of emotion -- in fact, it's quite small -- and it's rare for her to do little more than smirk. She's seldom in a particularly bad mood or even in a very good mood. However, she does enjoy joking around, even if most of what she says is completely deadpanned. Very rarely does she take anything outside of her work very seriously, and even then she'll often be sarcastic with her clients. She has a short range of facial expressions, ranging from somewhat-smirking to somewhat-scowling. While Avery doesn't necessarily bottle up her emotions, she often doesn't display them, only because the desire to do so seldom arises. hat's not to say, however, that she won't go out of her way to inconvenience someone she doesn't like. Avery has a tendency to be a little bit spiteful, and likes to stir shit up just because she can. It's not in her nature to kill without cause and to attack without being attacked first. She'll deflect conflict when she can, and ignore instigators who are looking for any manner of a serious fight. She doesn't like to get attached to people and she tries not to stay in one place for too long, lest she want to settle down. History Avery Hollis Barlow was born on March 28th, 1985, to middle-class Marcus and Denise Barlow, in the northeastern United States. Her parents wanted a boy, and gave her a unisex name in order to compensate for the fact that she was a girl, having firmly believed that she was going to be a boy and having wanted a boy. The next year, her parents decided to try again, and when Avery was two, her brother Marcus, Jr. -- most often called "Marky" to avoid confusion -- was born. Marcus and Denise spent all their time from that point on coddling the son they had wanted and ignoring their older daughter entirely, offering her only the barest of attentions when she was hurt or injured. By the time Avery was going to school, she had begun to groom herself to act more like a boy to get her parents' attention. She was not shy or even particularly quiet, but in school her teachers all noticed and frequently commented that the girl didn't show a proper range of emotion. Her parents would insist that they would check her out to make sure she was "all there" psychologically, but they never did, instead putting all their time and effort into Marky. Avery asked for her hair to be cut short, and even when she was in elementary school, she wanted to be on all the sports teams, as if that would fool her parents into believing she was a boy so they would start paying attention to her. Because of her dedication to this vain pursuit, she neglected actual studies and kept her grades only high enough to remain on her sports teams. She didn't have a lot of friends, and the few she did have were boys from the sports teams she had been so desperate to play on. Avery was often teased for being such a tomboy, and the people in her classes wouldn't hesitate to remind her that she was a girl, and tease her about her boyish tendencies. Meanwhile, the constant coddling and invasion of privacy drove Marky to shut everyone out of his life entirely. He liked to go hide in his older sister's room, knowing that his parents seldom cared to look for him there. Where Avery craved attention from the parents who were unwilling to give it, Marky detested the constant attention from his overzealously affectionate parents. By the time she went to middle school, her friends began to cut her off. The girls ignored her because she acted like a boy, and the boys ignored her because she was a girl. It was hard for her to display a wide range of emotion to show how deeply this hurt her, since she was so stoic all the time. She was often deemed scary and weird. Avery was incredibly perceptive, especially as a result of this, realizing just how people acted and just how shallow and cruel they could be. Deep perception came easy to her, although she seldom utilized this knowledge. The summer after seventh grade, Avery decided that she was totally fed up with being neglected and ignored. She demanded that her parents let her transfer schools for eighth grade. In her final act of desperation and defiance, from having been ignored by so many people throughout her life, she grew her hair out and learned to put on makeup and dress and act like a girl. Avery forced herself to learn how to smile and how not to crack stupid jokes in her personal deadpan style, instead making cutesy little jokes and giggling girlishly right after. It was the exact kind of person she hated to be, had groomed herself not to be, but she figured that there was no way her parents were going to pay attention to her regardless of how masculine she acted, and she would be damned if she would let that stupid reason prevent her from having friends at school. At her new school, everyone loved her. Because she was so feminine and optimistic and she was constantly found with a big, fake smile plastered over her face, she was extremely popular with both genders. The first week of eighth grade, for the first time in her life, she was asked out by a boy, and she said yes, excited that her plan was working but chagrined that this was what she had to reduce herself to, only to get people to like her. However, she reveled in the excitement of having friends and boyfriends for the first time in her life, and found that she couldn't give it up. Being a fake somebody was so much better than being a nobody. After just a year, Avery had gotten herself a reputation for dating around, and after being pressured into it by a boyfriend the summer right after eighth grade, she gave up her virginity and ended up with a reputation for sleeping around, too. The popularity clearly came with its own drawbacks. Somehow, despite her best efforts, she had earned a reputation as a slut, rather than a loser, and found that it wasn't much better this way. But she remembered how hard it had been for her back when she had been so devastatingly unpopular, and refused to change back to who she really was. It was hard for her to believe that even the jocky tomboy she had been before was who she had been before was who she really was; there had to be a medium somewhere that she was comfortable with. But because she was so perceptive, it was easy to see how she could manipulate people into liking her, even when she was apparently unlikeable. After a few years of sleeping around, close to the end of high school, it was Marky who influenced her to go back to her previous self. He had grown to be introverted and disinterested with popularity -- and, as a result, was incredibly unpopular. He called her out on being a fake, and pointed out that she wasn't really happy. A few weeks before she graduated, Avery decided that she no longer wanted the reputation she had. Instead, of graduating and moving onto the next part of her life with a dirty reputation based on someone she didn't associate herself with, she decided to put herself on as someone she knew well and could be comfortable and happy with being. She cut her hair short again and started dressing how she wanted. Just before graduation, she got a couple of piercings and ignored what her parents or her classmates would think. When she convinced herself that their opinions didn't matter, life was a lot easier to live. Avery started off going to college nearby, although after two years, by the time she was twenty, she realized she hated going to college, since she wasn't particularly smart and her real talents were in things closer to street-smarts than book-smarts. She took a job as a delivery person for a local delivery company that would take packages and letters and send them around the city for cheaper than the national postal service could, and found that she was very pleased with this job. She met a wide variety of people and was happy to ride a bicycle and get out into the world. It was a fun job, and one that she was very good at, especially when she decided to look for the person she was trying to deliver to. She kept the job for a few years, before the dead rose. Her athletic prowess came in handy then, as well as her chances to test out her logic and perceptive skills. She kept her job, delivering small things and supplies between groups of humans in exchange for whatevers he could get, maintaining her bicycle and sometimes working out during her free time. She didn't particularly miss anyone she had known beforehand, save for Marky, who, last she had heard of him, was doing the smart thing and getting the fuck out of Dodge. A few months in, Avery was attacked and left for dead by an Overmind who wanted the supplies she was carrying. Fortunately, the recipient of her most recent delivery, found her. It was a Vampyre, which Avery didn't really know anything about at the time. Wanting to save her life, he bit her and turned her, nursing her back to health before leaving after Avery told him that the Overmind had stolen the things she was supposed to bring to him. Since she was much stronger and faster as a Vampyre, and having acquired the ability to keep the vicious Lessers off of her through big crowds, her job became much easier, and she continued to perform it, with greater efficiency and dedication than she had before.